Intruders apparently defaced the official
campaign site of Republican presidential
candidate George W. Bush early
Tuesday, replacing a photo of the
Texas governor with a bright red
hammer and sickle.

Visitors said the modified Web site,
which quoted socialist literature and
linked to the International Communist
League, was visible around 9:15 a.m.
EDT.

Campaign officials spent the morning
trying to puzzle out exactly what
happened, a task made more difficult
by the fact that the Web server
automatically copied over the hacked
page with the original one.

"We're trying to find out whether we
had a visitor. Indications are that we
had a visitor," said Greg Sedberry,
georgewbush.com webmaster.

This isn't the first time a presidential
contender has been embarrassed. Vice
President Al Gore's campaign site was
hacked on 10 April. "Gore was broken
into in April. That's the only one I know
of in the 2000 race," said B.K. DeLong,
curator of the defacement archive at
attrition.org.

On Monday, the campaign introduced a
newly designed Web site, switching
from a single Unix server to multiple
computers running Windows NT and
Microsoft's Web server.

"I inherited that Unix box when I came
on board [in July]," Sedberry said. "I
took that box and said we need a more
robust setup. It was developed from
scratch, and that's where the problems
can arise."

The campaign's NT machines are
co-located at Austin-based

Illuminati Online

which says it hosts 2,000
customer Web sites.

"The George W. Bush machines are not
under our control. They maintain
everything on those machines," said an
Illuminati Online engineer.

Jeremy Pinnix, webmaster of
Nashville-based Anderson Thomas
Design, said he noticed the hacked site
early Tuesday.

"I called them [the campaign] right
away. They asked me to do a screen
capture and to email it to them. I
haven't heard back, but when I
refreshed, it had been fixed," he said.

"Our first battle plan is to figure out
exactly what happened," said campaign
spokeswoman Mindy Tucker. "This is
obviously a problem that anyone who
has a Web site faces."

Sedberry said the NT machines are
load-balanced, and the master Web
server copies files every few minutes to
the duplicate ones.

"We're going through the whole
system saying, 'Are we sure we locked
that down?'" said campaign webmaster
Sedberry. "We're finishing it up,
double-checking, triple-checking. And
we'll see."

According to a screen snapshot, the
hacked site quoted the International
Communist League's belief that "we
must take the Marxist doctrine of
proletarian revolution out of the realm
of theory and give it reality."